It's an arresting image – the moment when a nun falls from Toronto's Bloor Street Viaduct in Michael Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion, and is caught by a worker. "He saw it was a black-garbed bird, a girl's white face. He saw this in the light that sprayed down inconsistently from a flare fifteen yards above them. They hung in the halter, pivoting over the valley, his broken arm loose on one side of him, holding the woman with the other … "

And this is an arresting idea from a group of Canadians – a plan to place permanent markers displaying text from stories and poems in the locations where they take place. Yesterday saw Ondaatje launch the project on Bloor Street Viaduct, and there are plans to place what they're calling Bookmarks across Canada – Carol Shields in Winnipeg, Michael Crummey in St John's, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces on Toronto's Grace Street.

"Readers can step right into the stories, experiencing the authors' visions and the real locales simultaneously," says Project Bookmark Canada's founder, the writer Miranda Hill, wife of bestselling Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes. "My vision is that you should be able to read your way right across Canada."

Lucky Canada. Why can't we do the same thing in the UK? It'd be great to have a mini-extract from Notes on a Scandal enshrined on Hampstead Heath, or JG Ballard in Shepperton, or To the Lighthouse on Skye. The problem is whom to pick – would Sheba's illicit trysts really win Hampstead, or ought the plum location to go to Will Self's post-apocalyptic version in The Book of Dave, or Wilkie Collins' nighttime vision in The Woman in White ("The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother's cottage")? With which stories, and where, would you bookmark the UK?